"You're Never Going To Be Perfect" Understanding Self-Esteem and Self-Confidence

Lola: I watched that Netflix series Sex/Life and I’m finished it now and I actually really liked it. Aside from the fact that the cast was hot, lmao. Yes, it’s the show people have been talking about with that hot actor from Falling INN Love also on Netflix and let’s just say you get to see a lot more of him in this one, even if only for a moment. All I’ll say is Jesus spent a little more time on that one. HAHAAHHA anyway, I actually liked the plot of the series. Basically, a woman that’s a wife and mom is now feeling less desired, less sexy, her man is having an arousal problem or idk whatever and she’s questioning her life choices because things in her daily life are just mundane now, I guess. She left her career to be a stay-at-home mom and that’s been an issue with her finding herself and now she’s missing her ex. It’s just a lot but I like it because it happens every day. Women feel less after marriage and kids. We’re usually the ones that change and adapt for everyone but ourselves and were just lost in the mix. But anyway, that’s a whole other podcast for another day, lol. Let’s get into today’s episode. 

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Lola: Hey y’all and welcome back to the podcast, if you’re new here hello, how are ya? I’m Lola and Welcome to the Awkward Mom Stage and If you’re back for another episode, thank you so much for supporting the show. 

Today’s episode was talking about the differences between Self-Esteem and Self-Confidence. Just like many others for the longest I just assumed they were different words with the same meaning. But people often confuse these two terms. Many assume they’re simply just two different words for the same thing, but this actually isn’t true. You can have a lot of self-esteem and minimal self-confidence and the opposite is also true as well.

I’m actually working on both my self- esteem and my self- confidence because over the years they have both really taken a beating. For me it’s been major life changes like kids, marriage, a move, stress, work, finances, etc. a lot has played a part in diminishing my self-esteem and self-confidence. But now that I’m trying to build that back up, I figured this would be the perfect topic to discuss this week on the podcast because I’ve heard many women in different groups that I’m in talking about how their self-esteem or confidence has since taken a shit. 

Having both Self- esteem and self-confidence is important. You’ll be more successful and just happier in general.  You’ll be happier with yourself as well if you can cultivate both qualities.

So first let’s see how Self-Confidence and Self-Esteem are different so we know which is which. 

Now self-confidence is situation specific. You can have a lot of self-confidence regarding your ability to do makeup, host a great party, or to play a sport. You can simultaneously have zero self-confidence in your ability to do dance or sing.

Self-confidence is the amount of trust you have in yourself to do a particular task well. So, if it’s something you’re not too confident in your ability to do said task then your self-confidence or the trust you have in yourself to do said task will be low. 

While Self-esteem is the general impression you have of yourself. So, self-esteem is a form of self-love. It’s how pleased you are with yourself in general. You can have a lot of self-confidence and very little self-esteem and again the opposite can also be true.

Self-confidence is also easier to build. Self-confidence is the result of preparation and success. For example, if you prepare well for an upcoming test or presentation, you’ll have confidence in your ability to do well on that test or during that presentation. Because you prepared and did what you needed to do to ensure that you had the knowledge you needed to complete whatever task. When you have a history of doing well at something, you’ll develop self-confidence in that area. So, once you start killing presentations and acing tests left and right your self-confidence in that subject or for that task will grow and become higher.

Meanwhile, Self-esteem can’t be built with achievements. Self-confidence can. A wall full of trophies and awards can really boost your self-confidence. However, it may do very little for your self-esteem. You can be great at something without valuing yourself. There are many things that I am great at and my confidence in being able to compete those tasks is high because I’ve done them and perfected what works for me. I’m a full body waxer by trade. So, my confidence in giving someone a great wax is high because I’ve been doing that for 7 years. Now if you ask me to give someone a tattoo, my confidence in that is going to be on the floor because I have no idea what the hell I’m doing. So that would be how to decipher between self-confidence and self-esteem because confidence comes from the ability to complete a task or do well at something while self- esteem cannot be built with achievements at all. 

Building self-confidence is work, but the work that needs to be done is quite clear. If you want to be confident at shooting free-throws, shoot 100 of them each day until you’re consistently successful. Practice giving speeches until you’re good at giving them and you’ll develop self-confidence in that area of your life. 

But when it comes to building self- esteem. Learning to love yourself more will help you build your self-esteem. Which I know is easier said than done. I’m working on it daily. I used to have high self-esteem and self- confidence but life has since kind of worked a wedge in that and now while my confidence may still be high in certain things that I do, my self- esteem has been low and struggling because it’s a part of self-love and really loving and being kind to yourself. Which is also needed when you’re trying to manifest the things you want in your life. Like lasts week’s episode when I was talking to Madison about how to start manifesting things and if self- esteem plays a part in your manifesting journey, and yes it does. If you don’t love yourself and have confidence and believe in yourself then what you’re manifesting is the opposite of what you want. While you may say oh, I’m manifesting having a great career and marriage or whatever it may be but in the back of your mind you have no self- esteem and you don’t really think highly of yourself at all. You have negative self-talk and so on. Therefore, you’re really still manifesting things you don’t want because that’s what you’re really actually focused on in the back of your mind.

Learning to love yourself and building your self-esteem is definitely going to be the key and a huge and important part of growing, manifesting, and living a happier, healthier life. 

So now that we know what self-confidence is and how to build it because that part is pretty easy and self-explanatory. The more your practice, prepare, and learn how to do something the higher your confidence will be and it’s generally faster and easier to build your confidence in something because it can all be learned and perfected. But let’s look at some ways to help build your self-esteem since the self-esteem part is harder to build because it’s also about undoing unhealthy habits, thoughts, negative self-talk, and all the things others have said to put you down. Self-esteem is definitely easier to tear down than it is to build up that’s for sure. These few ways should help build your self-esteem with repeated use until they become habit or second nature to you so that you can have both high self-esteem and self-confidence.

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Lola: You’ll want to Identify your values and use them to guide your decisions. Like make a list of your values and refer back to your list often.  I did a list of top 10 values. Some people have like their top 20 values but I like to keep things pretty simple it helps me stick to creating or correcting habits in a less intimidating way. You don’t want to overwhelm yourself ever because that will affect your outcome in a negative way. 

Just think about changes you can make to your life to live according to your values. Failing to adhere to your values is a leading cause of low self-esteem. So, write down some values and try to stick to them. 

Stop trying to be perfect. Reject perfection, ok? Nobody is perfect, and if you’re trying to be perfect, you’re going to fail. If you consistently fail at living up to a standard, your self-esteem will suffer. Lower the bar to something achievable and give yourself the chance to be pleased with yourself. Obviously, that doesn’t mean just lower all your standards because you’re too high maintenance. It just means stop trying to overachieve or make more work for yourself. You don’t have to be perfect at everything all the time and honestly you never will. The sooner you learn that the faster your life will become better because you aren’t stressing yourself out as much over everything.  

Start to Volunteer. Spend some of your time each week helping others that are less fortunate. This is a great way to show yourself that you’re a kind and giving person. Find an organization that serves a cause that you feel empathy for. If you can’t donate time at the moment because of a busy schedule than take the time to donate to a local shelter or good cause. Doing something for others, especially less fortunate strangers and knowing that you’re helping them out and you expect nothing in return is the best feeling because you’re helping someone else get back on their feet or start their life over while simultaneously boosting your own self-esteem because you were able to make someone else’s day. 

Be nice to yourself. Manage your self-talk. If you spend all day insulting yourself, it’s tough to feel good about yourself. There’s no way to permanently shut down your inner vocalizations, but you can manage them. Stop yourself when you notice negative self-talk and turn it to something positive. If you notice that you’re looking in the mirror and nitpicking or talking about all the things you hate about yourself, stop yourself and say something you love about yourself instead. When you feel yourself start to become negative or speak negatively about an activity or project you aren’t doing well on. Stop and take a break, think about the things you are good at and focus on those, get help with what you aren’t getting and move on. Everyday isn’t going to be rainbows and sunshine, there will be bad days and times where we are negative towards ourselves. The key is when you notice it’s happening you stop it and try to turn it around. Say something positive, think about something that will make you laugh, watch something that will make you laugh. Whatever you need to do to get yourself out of that negative head space and back on a healthier thought path. 

So though self-esteem and self-confidence are different and you can have one without the other. It’s way more powerful to have both than one or the other. You can be wildly successful with just self-confidence, but your successes will never make you happy or satisfied because you still have low self-esteem and that means you don’t really think that highly of yourself. Your achievements mean nothing because you still don’t feel worthy of what you have or what you’re trying to gain because your self-esteem is low. Both self- esteem and confidence work together synergistically to create a life experience that can’t be duplicated any other way. So, you want to focus on building your self-confidence in the areas that serve you. Like what you want to do in life for career, business, etc. and then you want to build your self-esteem so you can love yourself. Because if you don’t love yourself or believe in yourself then nothing that you’re doing matters because the one that it's supposed to make happy is you and if you aren’t happy than nothing else matters. Self-love is important and detrimental to your health honestly both mentally and physically. You can’t feel sexy or confident or ready to concur the world if you have low self-esteem. It’s just not going to happen. Therefore your, mind, your sex life, your relationships, your business, your career, all of that will suffer at the hands of low self-esteem. Because it’s much more important than people wanted to believe for so long. 

I also think especially for women it was an issue for a long time before women really started to speak up and it still is when a woman is confident and has high self- esteem. When she loves herself and feels sexy and has no problem letting the world know. A lot of times the world tries to dull their shine. Like how dare a woman want to be seen and heard. Outrageous. You’re a woman, you’re a mother, your blah blah blah, every step of life women are being told to be less than, to shine a little less, to be a little less intimidating around men, how are you going to get married, fear of intimidating others, don’t be too aggressive it makes you look like a bitch, don’t wear that past the age of xyz. Well guess what y'all, it’s 2021 and it’s time for women to stop being afraid of loving themselves, of wanting to be sexy, for loving sex, for smoking weed, for loving money, or for wanting more from life and their partners.

Focus on you and what you love and building yourself up. Anyone who doesn’t want you to be who you are shouldn’t be with you or around you anyway. Let’s work on our self-esteem and if you need to work on your self-confidence as well. It’s not going to happen overnight for either of them but your confidence in whatever it is you’re trying to do will quickly build the more you work on it. Your self-esteem will take a little more time to build but day by day it will get better.

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Lola: I posted on The Awkward Mom Stage on Instagram about the four ways to boost your self-esteem. So, you can really use those to start the road map to help building that. So, let’s see I said that you can use positive affirmations to change your self-talk, which you can write down some affirmations, you can say affirmations, I usually say 4 positive affirmations in the morning and 4 positive affirmations at night about myself. And I’ll say those every day and that will kind of ya know help have some positivity going throughout the day or you can write down some affirmations and put them somewhere where you can see them every morning because that usually helps people as well. You can remember your past achievements so when you feel like you haven’t accomplished anything at all. You can sit back and think about things you’ve accomplished in the past and this will help you remember you know at one point you thought that particular task or job was impossible or would never end and you got through it and achieved your goal.

You can redecorate a room or give yourself a makeover. I don’t know how many times I’ve funs hued a room or changed around the furniture or cut my hair or got extensions or whatever to change my appearance or to change the appearance of my room or home. It happens. Sometimes getting the bad Jew Jew or memories out helps to ya know move on so if that is what you need to do then definitely try that out. 

Or you can to surround yourself with positive people. You need good support in your life anyway and in your self-esteem journey, so you want people around you who are going to lift you up and encourage you and people around them rather than being a negative and unsafe place for you know you to be yourself. 

Now that we’ve really broken down the differences between Self-Esteem and Self- Confidence, I hope today’s episode was helpful in distinguishing the difference between the two. For me, knowing that they actually are two different things helped me a lot in feeling less overwhelmed with needing to build both. 

It was easier for me to build my confidence and I also realized I already had high self-confidence in certain areas because again confidence is more in your ability to do something. Then when I realized it was actually my self-esteem that was low and needed the work was helpful too because I could just focus on that more. Which was also blocking my ability to manifest effectively. Because again, you need the right tools and information if the experience is going to work out for you. 

Lola: Well, that’s it for this episode y’all. I hope this has helped you learn and understand more about the difference between self-esteem and self-confidence. Knowing the difference has helped me in focusing on building my self-esteem so that it can match my self-confidence in the things that I do. I hope this helped you to figure out which one you need to work on and which one you already have a lot of. 

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Byyyeeee!!

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